Category Archives: Marriage & Family

NPR: Bill Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation and a conservative legal scholar who opposes legalizing polygamy, says the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage played a role in the decision.

AP: United Methodist church officials defrocked a pastor from central Pennsylvania on Thursday who officiated his son’s gay wedding in Massachusetts, a move seen as contradictory to the denomination’s beliefs.

The American: The controversy over a recent study on gay parenting illustrates a sociopolitical groupthink operating in the social scientific community. Scientists should go where the science takes them, not where their politics does.

WV Gazette: The state attorney general’s office asked a judge this week to throw out a federal lawsuit challenging West Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage, saying the plaintiffs in the case don’t have a legal basis to challenge the law.

NY Post: A married, heterosexual gym teacher at a tony Upper West Side private school was fired because his lesbian supervisor disapproved of his “traditional family status,” the canned teacher claims in a new Manhattan lawsuit.

Baptist Press: Maryland/Delaware Baptists approved new content to their constitution and bylaws regarding the convention’s stance on biblical marriage and the use of convention property for marriage ceremonies during their 178th annual meeting.

Oregon Live: Kelly Clark, a Portland attorney, contends otherwise in a lawsuit accusing the commissioners of violating the public meetings law. He says the violations warrant reversing the county’s action. In an interview, Clark said he thinks the commissioners purposefully used a rolling series of conversations to discuss the licensing change. He said they hoped to avoid any arrangement that would require a public meeting.

Houston Chronicle: Harris County Republicans, led by the county’s GOP chairman, sued the City of Houston Tuesday over Mayor Annise Parker’s extension of health and life insurance benefits to all spouses of legally married employees, including same-sex couples in November.

Ed Whelan at National Review: Now that I’ve vented about how poorly written the opinion in Brown v. Buhman is, I’ll offer some comments about its reasoning (pp. 52-62) that the cohabitation prong of Utah’s bigamy statute has been enforced in a discriminatory manner against “religious cohabitation.”

CBS: “It seems like, to me, a vagina – as a man – would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me,” Robertson stated. “I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.” Robertson described in the interview how sin is becoming acceptable in America and that the country needs to turn back to its Christian values.

The Patriot News (AP): A federal judge hearing a challenge to Pennsylvania’s law banning recognition of same-sex marriages is keeping the case on track for trial by preventing an appellate review at this stage. | Opinion: Whitewood v. Wolf | Hat tip: How Appealing

Texas Pastor’s Council: In response to a decision several weeks ago by Houston Mayor Annise Parker to recognize same sex “marriages” from other states and extend employee benefits to them, Houston Area Pastor Council has initiated a legal challenge (Pidgeon and Hicks v. Parker) that resulted in a Temporary Restraining Order being placed on her action.

AP: An Ohio Amish couple who fled their home with their 11-year-old daughter so she wouldn’t be forced to get chemotherapy could be home for the holidays but not without a favorable decision from a judge, their lawyer says.

AP: Both sides of a fight over whether gay marriage should be recognized on Ohio death certificates despite a statewide constitutional ban were set to argue their cases in front of a federal judge in Cincinnati.

MSNBC: Same-sex spouses of National Guardsmen can officially obtain benefits in any state, the Department of Defense announced on Friday, ending a period of resistance among several conservative holdouts.

Brandon Ambrosino at The Atlantic: alling someone “anti-gay” when his behavior is undeserving of that label doesn’t only end civil discussion – it degrades the foundation that undergirds a democratic, pluralistic society.

Art Leonard Observations: Finding that prosecuting a man for failing to register as a sex offender on the basis of an old conviction under an unconstitutional sodomy law would be “unthinkable,” U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg granted a writ of habeas corpus to Charlton Green on December 9, directing that the State of Georgia release him from the obligations of probation to which he had been sentence.

National Review: I came to see that the real question is not “who can marry whom,” but rather “what is marriage?” It became clear to us that the former question was impossible to address without answering the latter. Indeed, any position on the former presupposes a particular answer to the latter.

ABC27.com: Lawyers in a key federal court challenge to Pennsylvania’s law that bans same-sex marriage say the state’s lawyers are using delay tactics and are making unreasonable and intrusive requests for information.

NJ.com: Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg said Sunday that she decided to follow the advice of Lambda Legal, a gay rights law group, to take the bill off the agenda. It was to be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee this afternoon.

The Economist: Yet strategists and pollsters report that—even after controlling for such variables as race, age, religiosity and income—marital status is a powerful predictor of Democratic voting (whereas married women and older widows lean slightly Republican).

Lambda Legal: Today, a federal court ordered the Cook County Clerk’s office to immediately issue marriage licenses to all Illinois same-sex couples who, because of a life-threatening illness, cannot wait until next summer to get married.

W. Bradford Wilcox at National Review: . . . . one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father.

WTSP.com: The case of Bostic v. Rainey could become the standard-bearer for the same-sex marriage movement as it emerges from last summer’s victories at the Supreme Court. For starters, it challenges a state constitutional amendment that’s all-inclusive in its exclusions: It bans same-sex marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships, and denies recognition in Virginia for those performed legally in other states.

Eugene Kontorovich at the Volokh Conspiracy: Brown v. Buhman and Bestiality
Now seems like a good time to revisit a post on bestiality from earlier this year, which surely seems less radical now. Bestiality bans are [even?] less constitutionally defensible than polygamy bans because the purported harms associated with the practice are lower.

Washington Post: The U.S. Education Department announced Friday that the federal government will now recognize all legal same-sex marriages for the purposes of applying for and receiving federal financial aid.

NJ.com: The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday is scheduled to hear a new bill called the Marriage Equality Act, (S3109) which is a slightly modified version of a bill (S1) to legalize gay marriage that Republican Gov. Chris Christie vetoed in 2012.

Catholic Culture: As Indiana legislators debate a proposed state constitutional amendment designed to preclude the possibility of same-sex marriage and civil unions, Indiana’s bishops have issued a statement upholding marriage as “a permanent partnership between one man and one woman ordered to the good of the couple and the procreation and education of children.”

LifeSiteNews: Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) has filed a sexual orientation discrimination complaint with the Department of Justice and the Department of Education against the Montgomery County, Maryland, Board of Education and its School Superintendent, Joshua Starr.

LifeSiteNews: For Massachusetts’s social conservatives, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back: Karyn Polito, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and former state senator, recently reversed her long-held opposition to same-sex “marriage” and announced she now favors the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual couples

Mona Charen at National Review: Pesident Obama addressed income inequality in a recent address but failed to mention one of the most significant contributors to rising inequality in America — the marriage gap.

Richard Stith at Mercatornet.com: Indiana’s Libertarian Party chair, Dan Drexler, announced in early November his opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment that would prevent Indiana from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. But the libertarian reason he gave for his opposition does not support that opposition.

Washington Examiner: One congressman’s beef with the National Republican Congressional Committee over its support for gay candidates will likely have little effect on the committee’s operations or fundraising. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., has tried to persuade other lawmakers and the committee not to support the campaigns of gay candidates, Politico first reported.

Robert Knight at the Washington Times: Years ago, when I was writing a book called “The Age of Consent,” about moral relativism, I was warned by a book agent that it wouldn’t fly with New York publishers. I had committed unpardonable sins in an early draft: defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman and critiquing the idea of putting women into combat. I also defended stay-at-home moms.

Christian Institute: Michael McClure and Kamala Devi are starring in Polyamory: Married and Dating, and are currently living with McClure’s girlfriend Rachel. “They’re spreading the gospel of polyamory, hoping to speed up societal acceptance of this kind of set-up,” ABC’s Nick Watt explained.

Christian Post: In a recent interview with CNN’s host Piers Morgan on his show “Piers Morgan Live,” well-known evangelical pastor Rick Warren was questioned about sensitive topic of homosexuality. Despite being familiar with Warren’s stance against same-sex marriage, Morgan was seeking to revisit the issue on the heels of a new papal institution.

Paul C. Burke and Brett L. Tolman at Salt Lake Tribune: The state of Utah now finds itself in the awkward position of arguing that last summer’s blockbuster U.S. Supreme Court decision, Windsor v United States, which struck down a discriminatory federal marriage law, should somehow be applied by the federal courts to uphold discriminatory marriage laws of a state.

McClain, Linda C., From Romer v. Evans to United States v. Windsor: Law as a Vehicle for Moral Disapproval in Amendment 2 and the Defense of Marriage Act (December 4, 2013). Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, Vol. 20, p. 351 (2013); Boston Univ. School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 13-51. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2363463

Religion Clause Blog: AP reports that the guardian, an attorney and registered nurse, has decided to drop her attempt to force the girl to resume chemotherapy treatments since she no longer knows where the girl is and cannot monitor her condition.

LifeSiteNews: Homosexual and transgender young people are more likely to be abused by people they are dating than their heterosexual counterparts, according to a September report from the Urban Institute.

Laurie DeRose at Family Studies: And yet in “Determinants of Long-Term Unions: Who Survives the ‘Seven Year Itch’?” Audrey Light and Yoshiaki Omori make the case that unions entered via cohabitation contribute to women’s chances of experiencing a union that lasts 12 years or more precisely because “the high probability of entering a cohabiting union more than offsets the relatively low probability of maintaining it for the long-term.” In other words, the high volume of cohabitation means that even with a short average duration, there will still be enough outliers that a significant fraction of long-term unions are cohabitations or began with cohabitation.

Omaha.com: Douglas County will extend benefits to the same-sex spouses of employees who were married legally in other states. The County Board voted Tuesday to change the definition of an eligible spouse from “legally married spouse” to “the person to whom the employee is legally married, regardless of whether that person is of the same gender or opposite gender of the employee.”

Anthony Esolen at Public Discourse: A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They’re all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children’s bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of their minds.”

AP: U.S. births rose after the late 1990s and hit an all-time high of more than 4.3 million in 2007. But then they started dropping each year, and in 2011 the number was as low as it had been in the 1990s.

Salt Lake Tribune: A federal judge will hear arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage brought by three couples who contend the prohibition is unconstitutional. Each side has asked U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby for summary judgment — that is, to find based on lack of disputed facts and existing law that there is no need for what would likely be a protracted legal fight over Utah’s Amendment 3, the ban approved by voters in 2004.

Kelly Bartlett at Mercator Net: Have gay rights activists overplayed their hand? Will Czekala-Chatham’s wedding buyer’s remorse be followed by American voter remorse as more citizens learn of the disruption caused by same sex marriage laws passed in some states, but not recognized in others?

AP: State officials reported Wednesday more than 7,000 same-sex couples got married between December 6, 2012, and the most recent complete month of data, September 2013. So far, most of the state’s same sex marriages, 62 percent, were between two women.

The Courant: A woman, whose same sex, domestic partner died as a result of medical malpractice, told the state Supreme Court Tuesday that she is entitled for constitutional reasons to damages for loss of consortium – even though she and her partner were not married.

AP: A challenge to Utah’s same-sex marriage ban by three gay couples is scheduled to be back in court Wednesday as a federal court judge hears arguments in a case being closely watched around the country.

CNSNews: Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the Catholic Church is losing the argument on gay marriage, because it has been “outmarketed,” but he asserted that the debate is not over.

Richard Socarides at The New Yorker: When do you think the Supreme Court might rule that there is a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage? Nobody can answer that precisely. There are now some forty-four cases in nineteen or twenty states moving forward. And one of them may be the case, or it may be some other case down the road. We can encourage the Court to take the right case at the right time and do the right thing—within a matter of years, not decades.
A lot of people now say this is inevitable; it’s a done deal. What do you say to those people? You know, ten minutes ago many of those same people were saying it was impossible. Now they are saying it’s inevitable. The truth of the matter is: it was never either.

The Independent: A pioneering study has shown for the first time that the brains of men and women are wired up differently which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour, scientists have said . . . “These maps show us a stark difference – and complementarity – in the architecture of the human brain that helps to provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Ragini Verma, professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George at Public Discourse: Prof. Charles Reid thinks love makes a marriage. He claims we think sex makes a marriage. In truth, comprehensive union makes a marriage. And getting marriage right matters for everyone . . . Redefining marriage collapses the distinction between marriage and companionship in principle and in practice. It therefore undermines all the marital norms . . .

Pew Research: While Europe is not the region with the highest level of religious hostilities – that remains the Middle East-North Africa region – harassment and attacks against religious minorities continue in many European countries. Indeed, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, hostilities against Jews in particular have been spreading.

Law and Religion UK: The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg has agreed Resolution 2036 on Tackling intolerance and discrimination in Europe with a special focus on Christians, based on a Report by the Assembly’s Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination.